Yamato-san
yandere=awesome
- Joined
- Jul 1, 2003
- Messages
- 1,414
- Reaction score
- 2
Blame 4Kids trying to turn them into more Americanized cartoon characters.
indeed. Some of the blame does rest with 4kids for changing them so drastically in the first place, as much as some people may deny it (or even find a lot of their lines funny). For all we know, TPCi probably felt that suddenly changing them into the vain romantics that they are in the Japanese version would be too sudden of a transition, so all they could do is attempt to work with how the characters were molded in the English version since day one.
Jouto seems to be the time when TR started to be more rewritten. I think that's a factor as well.
that's where you'd be wrong. From the very beginning, it seems that 4kids tried to make them fit in with the type of characters you'd expect to see in a typical Saturday morning cartoon (keep in mind, anime wasn't very big at this time), so they made them act a lot more like just plain goofballs than they did in the original, even upping the ante by making James seem stereotypically gay (especially after Ted Lewis, whom just made the character sound whiny at worst, relinquished the role over to Eric Stuart) and Meowth having a Brooklyn accent. There have been notable dialog changes as well. In the (first) motto itself, while Musashi's lines were left mostly intact, the motto's beginning, as well as most of Kojirou's lines, had some notable alterations that could arguably reflect how these characters should be viewed (as I mentioned, they're vain romantics, so it'd make sense to respond to one's question with "the world's compassion" and talking poetically about their future success while using the galaxy as a motif.... in English, they start talking about "double trouble" and James seems to be more directly talking about how the Rocket organization intends to conquest through force, note the lines "extend our reach to the stars above" and "surrender now and prepare to fight" as opposed to something like "a white tomorrow awaits us"; though still a bit poetic, this seems to suggest a more violent and serious disposition, which seems all the more contradictory given 4kids's rewriting of them).
Some may disagree with me, but I find a lot of their dialog in the original to be of much higher quality than what 4kids would replace it with. One of my favorite instances was in the episode where Satoshi catches Hitokage. While both Nyaasu and Meowth complain about having a machine that only ends up digging another pitfall trap, Meowth goes on to complain about how Jessie and James forgot where they dug the hole after they covered it. Nyaasu, on the other hand, questions the need to cover a hole when the machine is "fully-automatic". Musashi retorts this by bringing up the limits of current technology. Personally, I found this exchange to be a lot cuter, involves a lot less of the cat simply bickering at the two, and it seems pretty well thought-out how they could casually reference the science of their world while still fitting into the context of the scene.
Well someone must be... I certainly recall that I'd wake up at ungodly hours on weekend mornings to watch Cartoons and I'm sure kids haven't changed that much 10 years.
the state of the internet in the past decade.... I rest my case.